Archive for February, 2008

I remember the simpler times in the life of facebook. It was clean, simple and relevant.
But ever since facebook has opened it's doors to third-party applications, I am constantly frustrated by the overload of irrelevant application invites. They've turned our friends into spammers as they send out mass invites to everyone on their friends list.
Take a look at the (very scaled down) image of my request confirmation page at left. When I opened it this morning, I had 65 requests—ranging anywhere from "Which 1950's Pin-Up Girl are you?" (I had three of these requests) to "Who were you in a past life?" (I had two of these).
To their credit, facebook has made some recent efforts to combat some of the more underhanded applications, including the ability to block applications, ignore all requests at once and requiring applications to give users advanced warning if they will need to invite friends to get information or access content.
Still, with more companies jumping on this bandwagon and new applications coming out every day, will the majority of users eventually become so overwhelmed with these disruptive and irrelevant applications that we cease to bother going through them anymore and simply opt to clean our request pages in one fell swoop with the "ignore all" each time we log in? I know I'm already there.